Norway’s government instructed a state-run pension fund not to invest in two Israeli firms because of their activity in eastern Jerusalem. The decision regarding the Government Pension Fund Global, or GPFG, appeared Thursday on the website of Norway’s finance ministry. It named two Israeli construction firms, Africa Israel Investments and Danya Cebus, as well as […]

German museums must improve their record on identifying and returning Nazi looted art, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder said. Speaking to some 200 people Tuesday at the Topography of Terror, a museum and documentation center in the German capital, Lauder said that a new commission of independent experts must be appointed to comb through […]

Detroit’s Jewish federation has hired an accounting firm to investigate possible financial irregularities at the local Jewish Community Center. In addition to hiring tax and auditing firm to conduct a “forensic investigation” of the center, the federation retained a separate firm to take over the center’s financial operations of the center, the Detroit Free Press […]

Twenty-four European parliamentarians called on the European Union to reinstate its working definition of anti-Semitism. The call was unanimously adopted on Tuesday by the lawmakers, who had traveled to Poland earlier this week to attend a ceremonial joint session with 58 Knesset members and dozens of counterparts from the Polish parliament on International Holocaust Remembrance […]

Oxfam accepted actress Scarlett Johansson’s resignation as a global ambassador, calling the role “incompatible” with her work for the Israeli company SodaStream. “Oxfam has accepted Scarlett Johansson’s decision to step down after eight years as a Global Ambassador and we are grateful for her many contributions,” the global anti-poverty charity said in a statement issued […]

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, the dean of Jewish lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives, said Thursday he will retire, and Republicans immediately jumped on the announcement as a sign of weakness in the Democratic party. He was first elected to Congress from a Los Angeles-area district in 1974, and his resignation will take effect […]

A trove of documents from the Nuremberg Trials found in a flea market in Israel was sold at auction Wednesday for $10,000, a spokesman for the Kedem Auction House in Jerusalem told the Associated Press. The trove of 500 pages, An American collector bought the documents, including some used to convict top Nazis at the […]

The so-called French comedian Dieudonne is a suspect for money laundering after police raided his Paris home Tuesday and found more than $1 million in cash there and in a theatre he operates. If charged and convicted, his previous hate crimes, primarily anti-Semitic slurs against Jews, will seem like petty theft, and God willing, his […]

French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, husband of Jewish actress Natalie Portman, told an Israeli newspaper that he is converting to Judaism. Millepied told the Hebrew-language Yediot Acharonot that he is “in the middle of the conversion process.” He added that he hopes that the conversion process will “come to an end soon and I will become […]

Legendary folk singer and political activist Pete Seeger, who died on Monday in New York City at the age of 94, left behind a complicated if not questionable legacy when it came to Israel. Famous for 1960s hits like “If I Had a Hammer,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Seeger […]

A new Jewish community was dedicated in the former East Berlin, in the footsteps of one destroyed by the Nazis. In an odd twist, the community has the same name as another Berlin congregation that is mired in legal limbo and debt after failing to prove it has any members. In Tuesday’s ceremonies at the […]

Nazi-looted paintings recovered by the Allies platoon known as the Monuments Men will be sold at auction in New York. The four lots will go on the block at Sotheby’s in New York on Thursday as part of a sale of Old Master paintings and sculpture. Some of the works were owned by the Rothschild […]

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Israeli President Shimon Peres paid tribute to Edgar Bronfman at a public memorial service Tuesday night. More than 1,000 people, including top Jewish communal leaders and alumni of the Bronfman Youth Fellowship program, turned out for the service held at Lincoln Center in New York. Bronfman, who […]

The Anti-Defamation League has accepted the “heartfelt apology” from venture capitalist Thomas Perkins, who likened criticism of the wealthy to Kristallnacht. “We believe that Mr. Perkins now realizes why his Holocaust comparison was so offensive,” the ADL said in a statement after a long conversation Monday between Perkins and the ADL’s national director, Abraham Foxman. […]